


All the Love in the World

by rei_c



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-03-24
Updated: 2006-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:24:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1287739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rei_c/pseuds/rei_c
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wonders, sometimes, when he sits at the dinner table in silence, if they think that he should be the one in the hospital, mad and dying, and his father the one out behind the golden ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the Love in the World

They stand in front of him, the three of them, golden and shining, as if the day is bright and sunrays are seeking them instead of black skies and rain drenching them all, plastering hair to skin and skin to mud. He stands behind them—but then again, they all do, and the golden ones never look back as the three lead three hundred in battle. He is one of the three hundred, faceless and nameless in a crowd of grey anonymity, in a crowd following three who have names, who have faces, who have love. 

\--

Sometimes Neville sits between his parents’ beds, turning a gum-wrapper over and over in his hands. They usually sleep when he is there, or else stare into space with a terrified look swirling in their eyes and faces. They never talk anymore, his parents, not even in that half-language they used to, and he’ll only go home after that to criticism and ignorance. He can handle the silence here, with his parents, but not at home with his grandmother and uncle and the look they have, as if they have measured him against his father and been sorely disappointed. He wonders, sometimes, when he sits at the dinner table in silence, when he hurls curses at an opponent just as faceless as he is, if they think that he should be the one in the hospital, mad and dying, and his father the one out behind the golden ones. His grandmother and uncle have gotten used to the noise his knife and fork make when he drops them and then excuses himself.

\--

Every so often, someone in the Order mentions the Ministry crew and Luna’s hand on his knee tightens, the placid fingers tensing, nails digging in past clothes and skin to strike against his bones. She has never been the same since the Order faced the Dark Lord’s forces on Glastonbury Tor and the crazed laughter and wand of Bellatrix Lestrange had held the dreamy-eyed girl under Cruciatus for minutes. The dreams were replaced by a glazed disorientation that seems to see to a world beyond even as her spells hit in the physical, stronger than they ever were before. Neville had saved her that day, and he can see some of them wondering if she only lays her head on his shoulder in long meetings because of that, if the Killing Curse brought them together. It wouldn’t be the first time, he hears them murmur, but they forget that he owed Bellatrix for his phantasmal life, and they don’t see Luna come to him in the darkness, a naked vision of the Otherworld, her eyes too clear, her movements too sharp, her moaning too jagged. They don’t know that her smile cuts him and that he craves it, because it reminds him that he is alive, that she is alive, that Bellatrix is not. 

\--

Neville’s voice is rusty and the first few spells of every battle hurt his throat. He never speaks anymore, not since the battle on Cader Idris, when he had suggested something that the golden ones had overruled and they had won that battle, protected the burial place and bones of Merlin, and he realised that he didn’t ever need to speak again, just follow orders. It was cold comfort that the words wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else; they never sounded as good when the words had taken on life, hanging in the air for all to hear and remember and mark as his, unable to disavow or polish. In his mind, the words sound perfect, and so they stay in his mind. 

\--

They are insects, the soldiers, falling so easily to curses and hexes, even as they follow the golden ones: Harry, who uses his magic as a wizard and his teeth as a wolf to take down his adversaries, switching between the two with such speed and prowess that Professor McGonagall would have been jealous, had she survived this long; Hermione, whose wards are created new for each fight and who can use those wards to cut down a third of the enemy in seconds; Ron, who had once been like Neville, forgotten in a Potter’s shadow, but is now laying out strategy for every battle, his anger boiling out of him wandlessly in the midst of them all. Neville wonders, at times, why anyone else needs to be there, the three of them able to triumph over a force one hundred times their number, so powerful and in tune are the three with one another, but a bitter taste fills his mouth as he knows that he is where he belongs. 

\--

At night, in his room, before Luna comes to him like a whisper in the darkness, he gives in to blasphemy. He thinks about the prophecy that Harry once shared with him, that night after Neville had killed Bellatrix, and wishes that he had been Chosen, that everyone would look up to him, that his parents would have died, that he had grown up knowing nothing of the Wizarding world and Dark Lord. If things had been different, then he wouldn’t be staring at a back he can never touch, at the backs of those who can and do, at his parents driven mad by a madwoman, at the faces of people who are relieved that things have happened the way that they have. But then Luna comes in, and he feels better, remembers that not everyone thinks he is as useless as he once was, that some even look at him with respect, that some… Luna comes in and he stops thinking, except to wonder if she carries more than just the curse of clear-sighted insanity in a body that sends him diving through a torturous Heaven. When she leaves, before daybreak, he pretends not to wonder if she is doing this because she has been ordered to, and she would never disobey an order, just as she says nothing about the tear tracks on his cheeks and the name he’d murmured throughout his restless sleep. 

\--

The war goes on and it’s automatic, anymore, to wake and sleep, to eat and drink, to dream and kill. He knows it is not for lack of trying, that the golden ones have faced the Dark Lord more times than their six hands can hold, but he harbours more bitterness with every day, until the day he seeks death out, jumping in front of a curse meant for another. As the dark light in his eyes begins to fade, he sees that the curse was meant for Harry, and he laughs, mind broken as he thinks that Harry has everything and doesn’t know it and so takes futures and lives and hope as well, eating them all and sharing them only with the extensions of his being, with Hermione and Ron, turning them into smiles and deep determination, even in the face of death, so much death. Neville wonders what Harry did to get all the love in the world and Neville dies with no answer, alone, in the middle of a raging battle, where he is supposed to be, behind the golden ones.


End file.
